Fully agree with your take.

I have no idea what the people guiding WASI are motivated about, but for sure it doesn't seem aligned with the community motivations... which might be hurting the ecosystem in the long run.

For the exact reasons the parent comment mentioned, at Wasmer we aimed for full POSIX compatibility as part of WASIX (a superset of WASI 0.1): https://wasix.org/. WASIX has support for many syscalls not available in WASI: fork, exec, longjmp, setjmp, threads, sockets, and many more. It's insightful to know that many people, and specially those close to the Bytecode Alliance, neglected the contributions, and try to push down the project, and even tried to make us rename it: https://github.com/wasix-org/cargo-wasix/issues/4